1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to servers for handling information which is in different modal for, to servers for interfacing between telephone calls and the internet, to methods of using such servers, to methods of using a multi-modal service provided by a server on the internet, and to software on a computer readable medium for carrying out such methods.
2. Background Art
It is known to integrate telephone and computer technologies in many ways. For example, it is known to provide a telephone which can be controlled by a desktop computer to enable the telephone to be controlled from menus on the screen of the computer. This enables numbers to be selected from on screen directories, and calls to be initiated by mouse button click.
Integration of telephony with the internet has also been tried in various ways. One example is mobile telephones having small displays and rudimentary internet access software for email and Web page downloading. A further example is a system enabling a user viewing a Web page the opportunity to click on a button to launch a telephone call which will connect their telephone to an agent of the business owning the Web page. This can be achieved either by a call over the PSTN (Public Service Telephone Network), or, if the user has a suitably equipped computer, by a voice over IP telephone conversation. The agent may given automatically a view of the same Web page as the user sees.
Such systems may be implemented using a Web server which is operable to respond to queries from the user's Web browser to fetch Web pages, and to execute CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts outside the server. CGI scripts are a mechanism to enable Web pages to be created at the time they are requested, enabling them to be tailored to the requester, or to contain up to date information from a database for example. For features such as animation sequences, or audio files which need to be played on the user's machine, it is known to send Java programs called applets to the user's machine, for execution there.
It is also known to provide computer speech recognition of speech on a telephone call, for applications such as directory assistance.
Various event-driven, state-based frameworks are also known to support speech recognition application development. They do not necessarily provide the functionality to develop complex applications, or can be difficult to interface to outside data sources. They may have separate graphical and speech user interfaces. It may be awkward to synchronize the two interfaces and implement complex applications using this loosely-integrated architecture. Also, it may be awkward to synchronise multiple interfaces using this architecture. Access to the internet may require a custom bridge between the state machine framework and the low level networking features of the host operating system. Specialised facilities for talking to the internet are not providedis difficult to manage the additional complexity and synchronisation problems caused by trying to support access to the internet.
It is also known to provide Web browsers with a user interface capable of supporting speech recognition in addition to the standard graphical interface. Similar capabilities are known in user terminals not having Web browsers.
It is also known to extend the capabilities of Web browsers through “plug-ins” which can be downloaded by the browser from another Web site, to enable the browser to handle new data formats such as audio files.